Expanding Downlink Capabilities Using Autonomous Directional Drilling with Rotary Steerable Systems

Abstract Directional drilling is a major activity in today's oil and gas industry, as most wells currently being drilled are directional wells. The complexity of the wells being drilled today creates the greatest risk and most promising scenarios for proper planning and implementation. The Autonomous Directional Drilling system includes an automated directional drilling advisor application that provides real-time working trajectories updates, steering recommendations, and downlink commands for rotary steerable system (RSS) tools. This DD Advisor system can be used in any type of well from start to finish by automatically providing the next sequence of actions at each survey point and carefully monitoring the steering responses to advise important actions to be taken. DD Advisor leverages the downhole closed-loop control capabilities to reduce the amount of intervention needed from surface. DD Advisor enables directional drilling with minimal human intervention either from the rig or from the office, taking advantage of the outstanding digitalization platform. DD Advisor with RSS capabilities is now deployed in the field and has been used in more than fifty different wells. These operations included successfully using the steering recommendations and sending the automated downlinks via software and hardware automated downlinking solutions. This operation was quite challenging and required automatically finding the optimum trajectory path with steering capability constraints, rate of penetration constraints, target deviation constraints, number of downlinks constraints, and minimizing risks to avoid costly failures. This paper presents a novel technical approach for automatically making directional drilling decisions. Autonomous Directional Drilling recently (March 2022) won a Houston Offshore Technology Conference technology award.